Dedicated Servers

Nov 16, 2011
• Joseph Redfern

I recently bought a Kimsufi-2G Dedicated Server from OVH (well, Kimsufi…). I’m using it to host project websites, where non-php programs might need to be run. Infact – I moved this blog over to the new server, so if you’re reading this, then all is well.

I’ve always wanted a dedicated server. VPS’s are good, but the thought of having a physical machine in a datacenter somewhere is, for some reason, very appealing to me. The server is costing me £16.80 a month, which isn’t too bad. I have 5TB of Bandwidth, 1TB hard disk, 2GB RAM and 1.2GHz Celeron. At first, I thought that the processor would be horrifically under-powered for my needs – but it’s coping very well. Infact, it’s doing better than another server I had, with a 2.66GHz Celeron Processor. The 1.2GHz Celeron is considerably newer than the 2.66GHz Celeron, and has 512KB L2 cache rather than 256KB – I put the different in speed down to that.

I opted to install Virtualmin, so that if any of my friends needed some hosting, I could quickly create them account. It uses a bit of RAM.. at the moment, with a couple of dynamic sites (including this one), memory usage is at 384MB. If this where a low end VPS, i would be slightly concerened – but given that I have 2GB RAM, it’s not a big issue for me.

I have set up the dedicated server to be my primary nameserver, with my $3.50/m BuyVM VPS being my secondary. This should provide a decent amount of redundancy, as the two servers are physically very far apart.

It is very tempting to get a Kimsufi 16G, which would have (as the name suggests) 16GB RAM, along with a quad core I5 (or better), a 2TB Hard Drive and 10TB Bandwidth for £43/m. However, I can’t really justify that price… especially since my £16.80 Server is treating me just fine.